Coherents for the time: imagery in the comedies of George Chapman

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the imagery and relationships between imagery and structure in the eight comedies that George Chapman wrote without collaboration. In the first chapter several underlying assumptions are set forth. These concern the appropriateness of formal criticism, the critical neglect of Chapman's adherence in comedy to philosophical as well as artistic decorum, and the significance of his expressed intention of creating ethical "coherents" for his age. The functions of dramatic imagery are classified, and Chapman's awareness of irony and decorum ls indicated by his commentaries on Homeric translations and his early non-dramatic poems. Finally, the usefulness of the commonplace symbolism of Fortune as an index to Chapman's ethical thought and comic structure is advanced in connection with his intellectual inheritance and moral predispositions. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria is shown to belie its apparent merely farcical content by Chapman's consistently ironic manipulation of imagery of the process of"knowing. [truncated]